CAVE, THE

SYNOPSIS:Deep in the Romanian forest, a team of scientists stumbles upon the ruins of a 13th century Abbey that has been built over the entrance to a giant underground cave system. Biologists believe the cave could be home to an undiscovered eco-system, so they hire a group of American cave-explorers to help them investigate its depths. Jack (Cole Hauser) and his brother Tyler (Eddie Cibrian) are thrill-seeking professional cave explorers who run a team of the top divers in the world, including Charlie (Piper Perabo) and Buchanan (Morris Chestnut). But what the team finds deep inside the cave is not just a new eco-system, but an entirely new - and deadly - species.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:You see that? asks Jack (Cole Hauser) pointing up the giant, dark cave wall, as we see a barely decipherable black, craggy wall. That's where we're going ... In a nutshell, this short exchange captures for me the essence of The Cave: a film going up a black hole into its own black hiding place. Possibly more accurately titled The Blur, this film shows how one could dispense with the services of a cameraman; just throw the camera into a deep well, let it tumble about a bit and edit the footage to the length required. Ditto for sequences on or below the water. All the time, make sure there is the minimum lighting so audiences have to imagine the scenes.

It is only the music that alerts us to be scared or apprehensive... brace now for some blurry action! shrieks the score, all high tensile percussion and screaming sound effects.

The style, for want of a better word, is the thing, here, because the story and the characters are just cut-outs from genre textbooks. Nothing added. The result is a boring (and often irritating) film in which the nasty creatures take too long to devour too few of the characters.